I'm not writing this to hit a weekly target

The cobra effect and the dangers of turning measures into targets.

New Things: A newsletter exploring the onslaught of newness in our lives.

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Whenever I’m thinking about ideas to send to you all, I’m reminded of a principle called Goodhart’s Law, which says: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”¹

In other words, when you tell people they’re being evaluated by a target they must hit, you risk pushing them to produce the wrong results in the name of reaching the target. The incentives can drive them to fixate on achieving the target, not achieving the overall goal.

The concept is named after the economist Charles Goodhart, who introduced it in a 1975 paper about monetary management. But the theory has been connected to a range of situations.

One of the most famous examples is a story about colonial India, when the British government sought to subdue an overpopulation of cobras in Delhi by placing a bounty on the snakes. Turn in a snakeskin, get some money.

But the plan backfired. People started farming cobras to cash in on the bounties, only exacerbating the population problem. This tale, which you can hear more about in a 2012 Freakonomics episode, spawned a shorthand for this phenomenon—the cobra effect.

A similar problem emerged in French-controlled Hanoi, Vietnam, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The city’s rat problem raised concerns about the spread of the bubonic plague, so French colonial administrators set a one-cent bounty on rat tails. I think you know what happened next. Here’s an excerpt from a book by Michael G. Vann, a historian:

As soon as the municipal administrators publicized the reward program, Vietnamese residents began to bring in thousands of tails … There were frequent sightings of rats without tails going about their business in the city streets. After some perplexity, the authorities realized that less-than-honest but quite resourceful characters were catching rats, but merely cutting off the tails and letting the still-living pests go free (perhaps to breed and produce more valuable tails). Later, things became even more serious as health inspectors discovered a disturbing development in the suburbs of Hanoi. These officials found that more enterprising but equally deceptive individuals were actually raising rats to collect the bounty.

The cobra effect lives on today.

Goodhart’s Law, or the cobra effect, isn’t limited to economic policy or invasive species. You can apply it to everyday situations:

• A fitness tracker rewards you for clocking 10,000 steps a day, so you spend your evenings pacing around your living room.

• A calorie-counting app pushes you to form an unhealthy diet to stay under the limit.

• You set a resolution to read book a week but soon begin selecting books purely based on length—not interest or relevance—to hit the target.

• A construction firm is given unrealistic milestones and must cut corners to fulfill a contract.

• A school becomes hyper-focused on its test scores and offers incentives for grades instead of providing a well-rounded educational experience.

That last one happened in a years-long cheating scandal in Atlanta that unraveled in the 2010s. From a piece in the Guardian:

“…178 teachers and principals at 44 schools had cheated … teachers at some Atlanta schools were erasing wrong answers and replacing them with correct ones. Better test scores on state tests resulted in performance bonuses for teachers and principals.”

Courtesy of Sketchplanations

Goodhart’s Law and our never-ending quest for inbox zero.

Workplace quotas can have this effect, too. When you’re evaluated based on a quota, you may do anything to meet that quota, even if the quality of the work diminishes.

On the flip side, a quota policy may demotivate workers. Here’s what Adam Cobb, a professor of management at Wharton, said in a Wharton write-up about quotas: “People might start withholding effort … If you can easily meet your monthly quota, why should you try as hard once the goal is reached? Doing so may encourage the company to raise the quota, making your life harder.”

You can find the cobra effect in academic research, too, with the push for publication fueling an increase in fake papers.

Today, we’re surrounded by measurements that can be tempting to use as targets in our behavior. What is inbox zero but a target that may distract us from completing more fulfilling work?

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The IKEA effect and AI chatbots

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When social media “likes” become targets.

I think a lot about the cobra effect with social media, where your success is tied to your ability to accrue views, likes, comments, and shares. Those targets can create an expectation that you must always be creating something new. Social media managers, influencers, and YouTubers have talked about the pressure to churn out new content to please algorithms and feed their audiences.

The weight can be felt by anyone with a social media account, blog, newsletter, or any other platform that creates incentives for new content in exchange for attention. (A Pew Research Center survey found that 29 percent of teens feel pressured to post something that will get a lot of likes and comments.)

You can also see the cobra effect in action when people take novelty to the extreme to deliver newness to audiences—the infamous TidePod challenge comes to mind, and more recently, tragic subway surfing deaths.

The point isn’t that metrics and targets are bad. But Goodhart’s Law tells us that we must be cautious about how we use powerful metrics—more present than ever before—to gauge success. Are we using them to take insightful signals about progress? Or as a way to drive behavior?

Which brings me back to the point I started with a few hundred words ago, and the title of this post. I send this newsletter every Sunday. The routine is helpful because it provides me with a structure to work within. Absent that framework, I could end up spending too little or too much time on it.

But I must remind myself that the weekly tempo isn’t the target. If it were, I’d be critiquing myself based on arbitrary timing, not on the quality of the information I’m sharing with you. I’d be more prone to “spin up” content, as opposed to finding interesting ideas to share with you. I try to keep Goodhart’s Law in mind each week.

As you go about your day, consider your own goals, personally and professionally. When you take an action, like posting a photo on social media or completing a work task, are you doing it to please a measurement? To hit a target?

Thanks for reading.

Eric

1. This simpler definition of Goodhart’s Law was published in 1997 by Marilyn Strathern, an anthropologist.